Down in Chicago's Pedway, Space p11 offers notes from the underground and conceptual art by plants

Zbigniew Bzdak / Chicago Tribune

Jonathan Solomon curated abd art installation for Space p11, an art gallery in the Chicago Pedway on Tuesday, Dec. 11, 2018. The first show features work by artist Lindsey French called "Phytovision."

Jonathan Solomon curated abd art installation for Space p11, an art gallery in the Chicago Pedway on Tuesday, Dec. 11, 2018. The first show features work by artist Lindsey French called "Phytovision." (Zbigniew Bzdak / Chicago Tribune)

KT HawbakerChicago Tribune

A morning commute in Chicago’s Pedway system sounds like mumbled phone calls and shuffling feet; it smells like burnt popcorn, body odor and the over-roasted beans at Starbucks.

The entire underground walkway system is a landscape of transition: The Metra station brings the burbs to and from the city, while Red and Blue Line travelers hop from the “L” and buzz up to their offices. It’s our own little ant colony where nothing is fixed and nothing lingers.

Out to amend all that are Jonathan D. Solomon, Director of Architecture, Interior Architecture, and Designed Objects at SAIC, and David L. Hays, Associate Professor and Associate Head of Urbana-Champaign’s Landscape Architecture program.

If you are someone who frequents the section of the Pedway underneath Randolph and Michigan, you probably noticed a lilac glow spewing from a storefront adjacent to L.A. Fitness. This aura belongs to Space P11, a new art gallery run by Solomon and Hays that aims to merge the subterranean with the sunlight.

“David and I are interested in the Pedway, because it is a space that is physically underground, and there are ways in which it is culturally underground,” Solomon said in a recent gallery visit. “And, it is both physically and culturally off-grid — it’s outside of Chicago’s primary spatial logic of the grid.”

Solomon and Hays say that the Pedway was once used to hasten the city’s commerce and facilitated constant cultural exchanges between its citizens. Upon its initiation, the Pedway functioned as an appendage of the Chicago’s meticulous grid.

“It’s a significant landscape within the city of Chicago, especially as people become acclimated to the idea that landscapes can also be indoors,” Hays added.

The two curators said that many approaches to the Pedway decry its lack of retail and call for a return to its modernist, money-driven heyday.

“They say, ‘Oh, if only it were more like the above-ground,’ which is exactly what it isn’t,” Hays continued. They are more interested in what the system is.

“One of the things that buildings do is isolate a part of nature and separate it from itself. They negotiate a different relationship. So, you could say that this is a type of interior park. And, it’s a very Chicago-park, because its accountable to the grid.”

And, what’s a park without plants?

The gallery’s first exhibition is “Phytovision” by Lindsey french, an artist who leaves her last name in lowercase to pay homage to botanic classifications.

“‘Phytovision,”as both a practice of perception and a plant-oriented media, begins as an experiment to destabilize the primacy of human vision,” french writes in an artist statement, "and it quietly opens a number of modes of perception beyond the clear distinctions of our human senses."

Essentially, french is playing with the Anthropocene, or the larger narrative about the symbiotic relationship between plants and humans — with work like videos made for audiences of flora and fauna.

“The human impact on the globe is now pervasive, and to talk about the natural world as something separate from the world of human intervention doesn’t make as much sense as it used to,” Solomon says. “We used to think about nature and landscape and buildings and architecture as separate theorizations, but that’s not the case anymore.”

“We’re in such a period of paradigm shifts, and it seems so important to get things in front of people so they can see what the new terms are, what the new aesthetic is,” Hays said. “If boundaries between humans and nature are blurring, what does that really look like?”

Probably like the blurred lines between underground and above-ground cultures — or, in this case, an art gallery.